I’m a little embarrassed that there hasn’t been an awesome Finda post since the last awesome release night, six long weeks ago. But now there is. I am less embarrassed. A bit. Maybe.

We’re tired though; this release night was… very demanding. The actual software release went swimmingly as usual; @medhatgayed did a great job of making sure all the i’s were dotted and t’s properly crossed. And it paid off again as he smoothly guided our production platform into version 4.6.

The… challenge was with the release night awesome entertainment. Since the UV paint episode we had to think long and hard about what we could do that would be at least as awesome. As it turns out, more awesome things are also much more work.

Take painting a large Yellow wall for example. It sounds like simple thing. It sounds pretty easy. It feels pretty damn painfully hard.

Have a look at the video below. We took it upon ourselves to awesomeify the big yellow wall next to which we sit. And we succeeded spectacularly, but it took 7 hours, 3 coats of paint, 3 tins of paint, 2 rolls of painters tape, several people, buckets of sweat and one or two tears… Tears of joy, at how damn beautiful our Yellow Finda logo turned out!

Now… to get through the rest of the day without actually losing the will to live completely and the job will be done…

Another rather uneventful release night down and another epic video made to document it. The night, it’s about releasing software. Seriously. It is. Ok, it’s more about waiting for SOLR to sync and waiting to see if things go horribly wrong (and of course being ready to fix these things…) than anything else.

The whole operation almost turned into an epic fail but some quick thinking by one @semaj_nil and an hour’s colouring saved it! Sort of. As it turns out, the contrast of green on yellow doesn’t exactly lend it’s self to be scanned well on a phone. We attempted to fix the contrast issue by colouring in the post-it’s with permanent marker… hacking the fail; agile to the max. That’s how we roll.

It still doesn’t scan on my phone at all but it seems to work just fine on some people’s old iPhones, so I guess that covers most people.

So the lesson for this evening? QR codes need to be in high contrast colours… and must remain so after they are converted to black and white.

And now, for your enjoyment, The Video Of The Construction Of The QR Code:

Also, we have Some Stills… Of The Construction Of The QR Code:

A large green and black QR code.

Medhat, mid KILL.

Robert and James doing things and stuff.

The video, getting Product Managed.

The things that are the QR code.

To see some of the new Finda listing page widgets that we released, go here:

So, after the last two awesome release nights we were hard pressed to come up with something even more awesome to keep the escalating awesome race going. We spent some time considering many options and finally decided on some UV insanity.

We’ve started a tradition with Finda releases to decorate the big Yellow wall that looms over the developers. To make it more friendly, to make it more Finda. As you will see in the video and pictures below, last night, we made it a LOT Finda. Awesome Finda.

The tools of the evening are two 42″ UV black lights (from Surplustronics who have an awesome collection of lights and electronic goodies) and three colours of invisible UV ink. Thanks to True Colours who sponsored us a vinyl Finda logo stencil we were able to… dab… small amounts of UV ink onto the big ‘ol Yellow wall making a nice, mostly invisible, Finda logo right there to look out over the awesome Yellow Coding Ninjas. Then things got… out of hand… you’ll see what I mean.

And now, for your enjoyment, the Finda development team presents the most epic of awesome (release night) time-lapse video’s! Since release night is made up of a vast majority of ‘hurry up and wait’ we’ve taken it upon ourselves to entertain… er… ourselves and yourselves, obviously (look, it’s been a long night). I hope you’re ready for some serious awesome…

Here’s the main video, ‘The Changing Of The Logo’ (I literally just made that up, seriously):

This is ‘The Making Of The Changing Of The Logo’:

And that is how you release software properly.

Edit: Just re-uploaded the video’s to YouTube (good old YouTube), hopefully they’re all there this time…

We’re done with the release process this evening and by all counts, it went swimmingly. The only unexpected event was that SOLR took much longer than usual to sync but we’re putting that down to a whole bunch additional data we’re now exporting to SOLR to make our search more awesome.

Testing picked up a couple of minor issues that the guys are busy fixing but otherwise, we’re done!

@keranm is busy sorting out our epic release night video’s at this very moment and I’ll post them the second they’re done!

On the 26th of January 2011 we released what was possibly the biggest change to Finda since it was launched. We did a complete UI and branding overhaul and a massive amount of effort went into the release to ensure that everything went smoothly. Which it did! The January 2011 release was by far the smoothest to date and was a testament to the effort and dedication that the team put into getting every detail right.

To celebrate the auspicious occasion, the team put a little something together to document release night. I think this kind of thing will turn into a tradition pretty quickly!